In response to public pressure, Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow recently announced a plan to divest from a source of funding it called “utterly abhorrent” and which it unequivocally condemned. The announcement addressed what Bacow presented as shared community values; it gave cold, hard numbers rather than talking around the issue, and it laid out a plan to both address the immediate harm and create structural change moving forward. In other words, it agreed with everything that the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign has asked of the administration — just not for prisons.
The HPDC has been petitioning the Harvard administration to divest from the complex web of companies propping up and incentivizing the continued construction and filling of prisons — inevitably with Black, Brown, poor, Queer and other politically marginalized people. The group’s pleas and their arguments have largely been met with silence, deflections to strawmen, or delay tactics— as was the case with an October 26th meeting that had been scheduled by the university months in advance, only for the President and members of the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility to refuse to state whether they’d even consider divestment, what the formal processes were for reaching a decision to divest, or whether they’d be willing to discuss asking their external fund managers for reports on investments in prisons.
By contrast, the revelations surrounding billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s human trafficking and his extensive connections to Harvard led to a community-wide response in September that parallels the HPDC’s demands almost line by line. The response shows that Harvard knows how to do the right thing — when it cares to.
So, as a student here, I’m asking Harvard to take another look at their message. I’m asking Harvard to listen to Harvard and …
- Show your values: The administration opened their announcement by immediately emphasizing the shared motivating values behind their actions, expressing horror at the revelations, condemning the actions and losing no time in considering the victims. This kind of unequivocal language establishing shared values is exactly how all healing should start. Their response to the HPDC, however, has largely been to deflect any commitment to values by holding that divestment from prisons would make the endowment “political.” First, holding that investment generally is not inherently political is a hell of a political privilege. More pointedly, prisons are themselves the sites of concentrated sexual violence against Black and brown people — including against minors. So representing the horror of prisons as an issue to debated around, rather than condemned as unequivocally as the human trafficking involved in the Epstein case, points to a racist divide on whose lives are valued.
- Take responsibility and take action…: Deflection tactics so thoroughly saturate our public discourse that they’re barely given a second thought. The administration’s reaction in the Epstein case, however — acknowledging that the revelations raise “important concerns” and asking for a review of Epstein’s donations to Harvard rather than simply apologizing and moving on — dramatically contradict the “slippery slope” arguments comparing divestment from prisons to divesting from corn syrup. By tracking down where these donations went, the university is also acknowledging the influence donations can have on research, highlighting the conflict of interests present in profiting from prisons while also training future judges, prosecutors, and legislators to expand prisons’ reach.
- …Even though this could be difficult: President Bacow made a point of stressing that the decentralization of Harvard’s donation process would make tracking Epstein’s donations particularly difficult— but worth the effort. This effort on their part highlights another point of contention between the administration and the HPDC: the definition of the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC). While in one instance Harvard specifies that it will investigate not only Epstein’s direct donations but also any donations that may have been directed by him, they also insist that only their investments in private prisons like CoreCivic and GEO Group should even be up for debate. By doing so, they deny the existence of the vast web of economic gains that continues to incentivize the caging of Black and Brown people, including contracts with: telecommunications companies such as Securus that are allowed to charge incarcerated people and their families exploitative rates; Taser manufacturers like Axon Enterprise which have settled dozens of wrongful death lawsuits, while Taser use in US prisons have been the subject of inquiries by the UN Committee against Torture; and bail bonds companies such as Tokio Marine Holdings which use the PIC’s targeting of poor communities to further exploit those people’s position through threats and harassment. This expansive view — targeting not just the obvious faces of the problem but the many structures that keep up political pressure to build more prisons and write laws to fill them — may make divestment more difficult, but, as with the Epstein case, worth the effort.
- Be transparent, share your findings and your progress: The administration took another opportunity to tackle the issue directly rather than deflecting by not only sharing hard numbers but also trusting and respecting their audience enough to understand that this is still a first step. By contrast, requests for information about the university’s investment in the PIC have been met by not only leaning into the narrow understanding of the problem as beginning and ending with private prisons, but also through complete silence, broken only after months of pressure by the HPDC. Even then, the administration alleges that the total investments in the PIC amount to “only” $18,000, a number that the university refused to provide evidence for and that has been contradicted by independent research done by the HPDC using what mandated public disclosures were available.
- Repair the Harm by investing in impacted communities: Harvard plans to “redirect the unspent resources to organizations that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.” Acknowledging this as “an unusual” but “proper” step for the university, Harvard reaches the same conclusion as the HPDC: It’s not enough to acknowledge the harm. Apologies require action and change in behavior. In the Epstein case, Harvard is reinvesting in groups helping victims of human trafficking and sexual assault. The HPDC similarly asks for re-investment of funds divested from the PIC into the communities that have been and continue to be the victims of state violence and political oppression.
- Think structurally: Rather than passing this off as an isolated event having slipped through the cracks, Harvard takes ownership over the structures that allowed for Epstein’s deep and ongoing relationships with the university, flagging that this event “raises significant questions about how institutions like ours review and vet donors.” In acknowledging that, Bacow announced that he will be “convening a group … to review how we prevent these situations in the future.” This drastically departs from Harvard’s stance on keeping the endowment “apolitical” in explicitly creating standards by which to judge the sources of their donations (and, by extension, their endowment). By admitting that such standards do exist (which we all knew, given that Harvard has, after sufficient pressure, divested from tobacco, South African apartheid, and PetroChina), Harvard has come to the same conclusion as the HPDC. All that’s left is to convince the administration that state violence against marginalized communities falls on a different side of that standard than corn syrup.
- Acknowledging Harvard’s leadership position: As unfortunate and unjust as it is, moves by institutions like Harvard have an outsized influence on other institutions and the country as a whole. That’s why excuses such as Harvard’s position that the costs of divestment aren’t worth the alleged $18,000 invested in companies like CoreCivic fall so flat. With regard to the Epstein case, the administration is more than willing to take on the mantle of the hero by declaring the university’s intention to “engage [their] peer institutions” in addressing the structural problems identified above. In other words, when the values match up, Harvard knows even the alleged $18,000 is not actually $18,000; it is, in fact, the limitless potential of a major voice in American discourse ringing the bell that something is wrong here and giving an example of what can be done about it.
- Show your values: Bacow closes his message both with one final condemnation of the specific actions that prompted Harvard’s new stance on donations, and with the humbling posture that “Harvard is not perfect.” Posturing as this may be, one of the central pillars of healing and change is just such an acknowledgement. Justice, however, requires not only acknowledgement of harm, but also shifting one’s disposition towards grace and humility when discovering new harms you’ve committed, not just speaking the words when your back is against the wall. So, I’m grateful for the words, but if Harvard is going to truly acknowledge that it is not perfect and that it will indeed “always strive to be better,” then it should learn from its own message and…
- Divest.
David Piña is a second-year student at Harvard Law School
A shortened version of this letter appeared in the Crimson